Paola M.

I work as a designer supporting organizations in shaping clear and meaningful identities. I guide clients through creative discovery processes to define their narrative, tone, and overall visual strategy, ensuring each project is grounded in authenticity and purpose.

The sectors I support are mainly cultural, environmental, and academic, with a particular focus on initiatives that promote sustainability and social development. I partner with organizations that aim to create positive impact and strengthen the communities they serve.

My practice spans brand identity, editorial design, data visualization, and the creation of educational tools and games. Across all these areas, I apply a human centered design approach: I pay close attention to users, their needs, motivations, and emotions, to craft designs that resonate and communicate with clarity.

A core part of my work is rooted in a philosophy of communication that goes beyond marketing. I see design as a way to create links, understanding, and connection between people, a tool that can bridge perspectives, support collective learning, and strengthen community narratives.

Collaboration is central to my process. I work closely with clients to co create visual solutions that reflect their values, amplify their impact, and help them tell their stories in ways that feel genuine and accessible. Whether developing a brand system, designing publications, or building pedagogical tools, my goal is to create work that fosters engagement, deepens relationships, and supports meaningful communication.

At Osmos, I worked as a designer supporting citizen engagement, mainly within architecture and urban planning projects. My role focused on developing co-creative workshops and participatory tools that helped project teams gather meaningful knowledge, feedback, and connection to their users and their lived realities.

As a designer, I transformed my clients’ needs for insight into concrete tools and meaningful conversations that supported their services, products, and project ambitions. I also transformed research findings and workshop insights into highly visual, accessible reports that made complex discoveries easy to understand and share.

For two years, I worked at the Dakar studio on projects across West and Central Africa, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Burkina Faso, and Senegal, as a strategic designer. My role was to support international organizations, public funds, and NGOs in achieving their goals through the design of research tools, co-creative workshops, pedagogical tools and games, and communication strategies.

I was responsible for helping program managers and field teams develop empathy for their users by designing and facilitating qualitative research tools, as well as by guiding them through the prototyping, testing, and refinement of solutions before large-scale implementation. I also contributed to the direction of communication strategies for public health campaigns and created data visualizations to help disseminate key health practices.

This human-centered design approach aimed to maximize the impact of projects while reducing the costs and risks linked to misunderstandings of users’ real needs.